On this episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse explore the most exceptional work of utopian thinking since the days of Occupy Wall Street: Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015). This is the co-hosts third such “CliffPod,” and they will hum over some of the most far-reaching and visionary aspects of this book, weighing out the co-authors’ success in diagnosing why the left has been--to use Jesse’s apt phrase--“drowning in failures” amid the continued carnage of Neoliberalism’s rotisserie blades. Matt & Jesse will also evaluate the insights the authors gain from how the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society were able to masterfully deploy “second hand dealers” and create a winning strategy for the right that the left has yet to match in any transformative way (and which go beyond the Cult of Direct Action and Paper Anarchy). Finally, our Abbot & Costello co-hosts will assess these authors’ policy demands and solutions in order to learn why this book about a post-work world is so vital to read for our deserved Star Trek future.

Marx's oft-cited comment in The German Ideology that in a communist society (or some version of a post-capitalist society) he would be able to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic" has become more famous than what he said in other places, more specifically.

"Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

IMPORTANT CORRECTION: Matthew Snyder’s allusion to “some weird kind of Mars landing where you have to do mine-work in some bad 1980’s Science Fiction film” is actually Peter Hyman’s Outland (1981)--the setting of which takes place on Jupiter where Sean Connery must find his inner High Noon as exploited workers mysteriously and ceaselessly continue to die.

“It was the first rebellion in the American colonies in which discontented frontiersmen took part. A similar uprising in Maryland took place later that year. The alliance between indentured servants and Africans (most enslaved until death or freed), united by their bond-servitude, disturbed the ruling class, who responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.”

And to Close Out This Week’s Shownotes About a Post-Work World, I’ll End With a Revolutionary Fop Who Proudly Wore Flowers as Lapels . . . Oscar Wilde. As He So Movingly Put It, So Many Years Ago, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

"A great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine."